Letter Purloined playwright David Isaacson
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This month has reinforced the contrasting nature of Chicago’s theater scene. At the ritzy Cadillac Palace Theatre, there’s Little Women, a traditional musical adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel. But up north in Wrigleyville, at the intimate Live Bait Theater, there’s Letter Purloined, a deliberately confusing, non-linear comedic mystery by Theater Oobleck. Each night, the six-member cast performs the play’s 26 scenes in random order, but Letter Purloined would be challenging even performed chronologically: One character speaks by humming melodies, and writer David Isaacson (who also plays King Navodar) fills the play with rapid-fire ideas taken from Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter,” Shakespeare’s Othello, and the life of Bosnian war criminal/poet Radovan Karadzic, among other things. The result could be the year’s most inventive local production. Isaacson recently spoke to The A.V. Club about tyrannical poet-kings, the Neo-Futurists, and having too many cooks in the kitchen.
The A.V. Club: This whole play is an amalgam of ideas. How did it come together?
David Isaacson: The character that I play is based on Radovan Karadzic. One of the things that interested me about him was that before he became the Serbian ruler of Bosnia, he was both a poet and a psychiatrist. He tended to tell his psychiatrist friends that he was Serbia’s greatest poet, and he would tell his poet friends that he was Serbia’s greatest psychiatrist. His wife was also a psychiatrist, so that’s how I came up with the idea of a queen who’s a psychiatrist and a king who’s a poet. Then once I started thinking about poet-kings, I was led toward Shakespeare, because Shakespeare always writes about kings who also happen to speak in poetry… so that’s one of the reasons that the language from Othello fits into it. All the poetry that my character speaks is actually lines from Othello. So that was the starting place, and another starting place was the idea of mixing up order. I had seen a couple plays that the Neo-Futurists have done, and of course they’re famous for mixing up order.
AVC: Letter Purloined definitely has a Neo-Futurists feel.
DI: Especially because I’ve cast one current and two former Neo-Futurists in the show. It definitely has a Neo-Futurist feel to it in many regards—it’s definitely inspired by them.
AVC: It’s similarly challenging, too, and not just because of the order. One character, Cassio, only speaks in melodies.
DI: The point isn’t getting what songs he’s doing; it’s more like getting the emotions of the characters and the emotional content of the music. It’s not so important for us that people get the chronology of what happened, but just get an overall sense of it. Almost, the point is not getting it, because sometimes things are very hard to get.
AVC: It seems like that would be tough for the actors. What snags did you hit in the process?
DI: There’s an ongoing debate about whether we should always act each scene the same, no matter where it came in the chronology that evening, or whether we could add some variety or nuance to our performance based on what the audience had already learned. Do you play a scene kind of dark or more serious as it comes to the end of the play, even though maybe on another night you would play it lighter because it comes earlier in the play? That was an interesting snag that we’ve never fully resolved.
AVC: That’s the kind of thing a director could decide, but Oobleck doesn’t use a director. How does that work?
DI: What happens with a director is, what you see on stage comes in large part from a single point of view. When you work without a director, it’s much more an amalgamation—of six points of view, in this case. In a play that’s going to be performed in a new order every night, that somehow seems more appropriate, because the play will take on a new essence every night.
AVC: Don’t you ever have too many cooks?
DI: Absolutely. There are rehearsals when we go home and everyone has agreed to disagree. A lot of organizations work by consensus, and it makes it harder, and it makes this process longer. When you work with a director, it’s a more efficient process, and it can be very rewarding, but working with Theater Oobleck brings different kinds of rewards.
AVC: You were one of Oobleck’s founding members. How has your writing style changed since the troupe formed?
DI: I would say that the voice has matured to some degree, and I don’t mean that necessarily as a compliment. The earlier plays certainly tended to be a bit more rambunctious and more physical than this play. This is the most intimate play I’ve ever written; it’s mostly scenes with just two people talking. I think that 17 years ago, I would have been scared to write such a play—and I guess I’m still scared to write such a play. But there you have it, I’ve written it.
